As others highlighted this is not surprising given that Gen Z uses phones a lot more than computers, and writing in one is completely different than in the other.
[Discussion from multiple comments ITT] It’s also damn slower to write in a phone screen, simply because it’s smaller - you need a bit more precision to hit the keys, and there’s no room to use all the fingers (unlike in a physical keyboard).
Swiping helps, but it brings up its own problems - the keyboard application needs to “guess” what you’re typing, and correcting mistakes consumes time; you need to look at the word being “guessed” instead of either the keyboard or the text being written, so your accuracy goes down (increasing the odds of wrong “guesses”); and eventually you need to tap write a few words anyway, so you’re basically required to type well two ways instead of just one to get any semblance of speed.
The tech-savvy reputation comes from the “digital native” narrative i.e. because they grew up with computers they must know computers, which is a silly fallacy because how one interacts with technology makes all the difference. It’s the same reason why everyone who grew up with electricity isn’t necessarily an electrician.
But then came smartphones, and instead they grew up with that…
The tech savvy reputation comes from millenials. We ARE tech savvy.
As an older Gen Z, yeah you guys probably have a better grasp on modern tech. Weirdly enough I actually have found that a weirdly high amount of folks my age know old analogue tech better, like vacuum tubes and old cars.
Older gen z here too, born in ‘99, and while I haven’t noticed the analogue thing, I’ve 100% noticed tech illiteracy in general.
Like, I’m talking about having a downloads folder full of junk because they don’t know that that’s where downloads end up. Installers left untouched after programs are installed because they’re worried that deleting the installer will delete the installed program.
Imo being raised with closed ecosystems like iPhones really stunted tech literacy for a lot of people. I grew up jailbreaking my phones and used my parent’s windows pc, so I kind of escaped it.
Yeah im also '99, and the weird analogue thing is probably regional. Yeah I agree that the tech illiteracy comes down largely to closed systems like Iphone, the most tech literate folks I know that are our age were largely on the poorer side of working class. Which makes sense if you are using hand me down tech ya probably will be doing a bit of debugging.
Only the early ones. By definition millenials are birth years 1981 to 1996, so the last ones were 11 when the first iPhone released.
I think every generation has their percentage of nerds and that just was a little higher in late Gen X and early millenials because computers were so new and you had to tinker to get anything working.
In the days of Apple II and similar machines a person who operated a computer knew it, because computers were simpler and because there was no other way and because you’d generally buy a cheaper toy if you didn’t want to learn it.
Also techno-optimism of the 70s viewed the future as something where computers make the average person more powerful in general - through knowing how to use a computer in general, that is, knowing how to write programs (or at least “create” something, like in HyperCard).
That was the narrative consistent with the rest of technology and society of that time, where any complex device would come with schematics and maintenance instructions.
Then something happened - most humans couldn’t keep up with the growing complexity. Something like that happened with me when I went to uni with undiagnosed AuDHD. There was a general path in the future before me - going there and learning there - but I didn’t know how I’m going to do that, and I just tried to persuade myself that I must, it should happen somehow if I do same things others do with more effort. Despite pretense and self-persuasion, I failed then.
It’s similar to our reality. The majority stopped understanding what happens around them, but kept pretending and persuading itself that it’s just them, that the new generation is fine with it all, that they don’t need those things they fail to understand, etc. Like when in class you don’t understand something, but pretend to. All the older generation does that. The younger generation does another thing - they try to ignore parts of the world they don’t understand, like hiding their heads in the sand. Or like a bullied kid just tries not to think about bullies. Or like a person living in a traditionally oppressive state just avoids talking about politics and society.
That narrative has outlived its reality not only with computers.
People are eager to believe in magic. Do you need to know how to cook if you have dinner and breakfast trees (thank you, LF Baum)? So they think we have such trees. It’s an illusion, of course. Very convenient, isn’t it, to make so many industries inaccessible to amateurs.
It’s very simple. There’s such a thing as “too complex”. The tower of Babel is one fitting metaphor.
You don’t need this complexity in an AK rifle. Just like that, you don’t need it in an analog TV. And in a digital TV you need much less complexity too. We don’t have it in our boots - generally. We don’t have it in our shirts. Why would we have it in things with main functionality closer to them in complexity than to SW combat droids?
I think Stanislaw Lem called this a “combinatoric explosion” when predicting it in one of his essays.
Right? I grew up with pen and paper, but I’m better with keyboards.
Being a tool user doesn’t make one a tool maker, though having grown up in the days you had to assemble and maintain your own tools does naturally facilitate growing into the latter from the former.
Test their typing skills on a smartphone.
I used to have an average typing speed of 120wpm but I haven’t touched a physical keyboard in hella long. I can type about that fast on my phone now, tho.
Test their typing skills on a smartphone without autocorrect.
I’d be faster without autocorrect than with. I feel like it chooses the wrong word more often than not.
Honestly, I miss the real keyboard from my 2009 Blackberry. No substitute for haptic feedback.
Those tiny physical qwerty keyboards were perfect. I often wish we could get that back, purely for typing accuracy.
The article is kind of all over the place mixing high-school graduates and fourth-graders? I can see how you’re sluggish at typing in fourth grade… The numbers for a 17 year old would be interesting… But yeah, 13 words per minute isn’t impressive. And most young people I know use phones and tablets, not computers. So naturally a good amount of them isn’t good around these things.
13 words per minute isn’t impressive
Worse than that, it’s abysmal. That would’ve been a failing grade back when I had a few months of mandatory typing classes back in 6th grade. 40 WPM was an A, and arguably that was overly generous due to factors like 1) most students weren’t nearly as exposed to the keyboard in their daily lives as they are today, 2) the testmakers probably didn’t fully grasp how important the Internet would become, 3) the test intentionally obscured the keyboard so you had to go by feel, and 4) because of (2), the class was very short despite taking you from knowing no typing to using all the English-language keys. (I just barely passed it IIRC in the 45-ish WPM range.)
On a whim, I decided to pull up a typing test – something I haven’t done in probably 5 years – and tried to see how I could do by simulating the speed of hunt-and-peck. I really tried to make it excruciatingly slow, and it still came out to just under 20 WPM. Next, I tried to see what I could do if I only had my left hand, and it was 35 WPM with 97% accuracy. If you chopped off one of my hands, I could still type 2.7x faster than the average kid in that school’s fourth grade could – bearing in mind that that’s the average, meaning as long as the data is roughly normal, about half of the students fall below even that.
That’s completely insane in a world where this iPad generation almost assuredly has tons of exposure to the QWERTY keyboard layout. It’s just inexcusable, it’s absolutely not the kids’ fault as them doubling their average typing speed after actually being taught to type shows that, and it totally tracks that it’s in Oklahoma.
We should ask rookie, because programming skills also sucks lol
Really shows the difference between Knowing how to work with, and how it works
By the time the generation after them get to working age, somebody will have invented the Swype keyboard for office use.
It will always be in uppercase unless you press the “no cap” button.
I was a terrible typer as a kid, two finger hunt and pecker. Got a job that necessitated fast typing while listening or reading. I learned how to touch type, or fake it enough, really quick. Humans are adaptable, that’s why we are everywhere, they just need the motivation to learn the skill.
For me it was AOL chat rooms and Star Trek role play that got my typing speed up, later followed by wow when voice chat was uncommon and communicating during a dungeon or raid required typing fast to not interrupt what you needed to do
Gen X here. I’ve got an average 123 WPM on typeracer, which puts me in the 99,8th percentile.
I started looking at the screen instead of the keyboard early on. There were touch typing classes as an option around 8th grade, I think, but it was literally just having a map of which fingers go where and typing text focusing on using the right fingers. I didn’t take one, but I think I’m using the right fingers for 80% of the keys. I’m moving my hands back and forth a bit to let my dominant fingers do the work.
I started playing MUDs in 1997 at age 13, and building up that muscle memory for every combination of two- or three letter commands probably did more than I’d care to admit. I still miss the responsiveness of a proper DOS prompt, or Linux tty.
Hell yeah, muds taught me to type fast, too :D. Realms of despair and others. Got me into modding, too, working on a custom server.
Which year is the dividing line for Gen X and Millennials?
I guess I might be a millennial or Xennial, then.
There really is a small cohort between Millennials and Gen X where our experience is rather unique.
1981
There’s also the term Xennials , which is 1977-1983.
I generalize millennials as too young to legally drink in the US (21) but old enough to remember the millennium. It’s not completely accurate though.
Those people literally do not exist. Was that a joke? I just woke up.
The passage of time is a cruel mistress.
When you fight and communicate by typing in a game, you tend to get good at it.
i have 70. how.
that’s because they’re not using computers or doing work
or doing work
Did you just pull a “kids these days don’t want to work anymore”?
Think it’s missing the f. Computers for work
I’d have to imagine most of the people calling them “tech savvy” are just seeing them on phones/tablets which are mostly “dumbed down” hardware in comparison to what you can do with a PC. There isn’t much to know about operating a phone or tablet.
Dumbed down hardware? No, the hardware of smartphones is very impressive. It is the software that is dumbed down in the sense that it takes control away from the user or operator.
The physical keyboard is just a tool. There are alternatives like speech-to-text software, virtual keyboards with swipe features, or stenotype.
The goal should be to use whatever is most effective and efficient for yourself, so if Gen Zrs are more used to touch screen, maybe they should invent a touch screen interface that you can use with the computer, maybe even incorporating the mouse somehow.
For me personally the touch interfaces right now are fucked up - I always tap the wrong letters on my phone, the auto-correct and suggestions used to compensate for this often times make it even worse, and swipe doesn’t come up with the words I want, I often have to swipe multiple times. I can’t imagine operating a computer like this, but maybe for Gen Zrs it’s no problem.
Maybe in the future you just need to think the word and it appears on the screen, and typing would be obsolete.
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The goal should be to use whatever is most effective and efficient for yourself,
And if taught as they should be, that will be the keyboard.
Counting out 5*5 on your fingers works and might be the fastest way you’ve been taught to multiply, but that doesn’t mean we should excuse schools not teaching times tables and how to use a caluclator.
As a Gen Z, I just don’t get it. One-off message, note or comment is fine. But have you never happened to have a long-ish conversation while on your phone? You get tired soon and want to go for a normal-sized physical keyboard.
100%
Input methods will change over time.
Guess that means I’m uncle tech support forever
Don’t you love throwing a whole bunch of people with different backgrounds into one bucket? 🙄
There’s a common misconception among boomers and gen x that “digital natives” like gen z have a god-given tech proficiency. However, there’s nothing about being born with a smartphone in your hand that teaches you anything about tech.
It’s not like people are getting better at changing oil as car ownership becomes more common, right?
Oh, I remember my childhood and how everybody (and sadly myself) considered us so knowledgeable because we sit chatting via ICQ, writing stupid shit in forum text RPGs, playing WarCraft III, Perfect World, IL2, KotOR and X-Wing Alliance all day.
That’s like 80% autocorrect anyway (I didn’t write a single word correctly in this sentence).
I think “digital naive” is a better phrase than “digital native”. They are born with computers all around them. But most adults forget to / are not able to educate them about technology and their implications.
I believe it’s a little more sinister than that. There is less education around these issues because many services have adopted a highly polished, “Walled-Garden” approach to their presentation. This keeps people who’ve grown up with the concepts in their walled garden loyal to that specific service, and makes it difficult for people to dig under the hood and work out how things really function without the sugar coating. They get irritated quickly because they’re used to everything “Just working” and don’t have experience on more open systems.
Therefore, they would like there to be no need for tech education unless you plan on a professional career as a tech.
As long as ownserhip don’t get carried away with enshittification chasing next quarter’s finance call and drive users away by annoying them into putting the extra effort in to learning about alternatives, they could keep it that way forever.
Note that to some extent, this might have been a necessary step in the relative popularity of computing.
Folks remembering how flexible and open ended things were in the 90s were a tiny sliver of the population. At the time about 1% of the world were participating in the internet, now the majority of the population participates on the internet.
I would have loved for the industry to keep up the trends of the 90s (AOL/Prodigy lost out to a federated internet, centralized computing yielded to personal computing) instead of going backwards (enduser devices becoming tethered to internet hosted software, relatively few internet domains and home hosted sites being considered suspicious rather than normal), but this might have just been what it took for the wider population to be able to cope.
I call them digital savages. You wouldn’t ask a jungle tribe about the Krebs cycle either.
Gen X and older witnessed a young generation born into kind of working, but kind of janky technology. They saw kids figure out obscure VCR programming interfaces that let the kids record something they wanted, but only by navigating very obtuse interface rendered exclusively with 7 segment displays with a few extra static indicators. A teenager playing that new DOS game, but first they had to struggle with getting the conventional memory, upper memory, EMS/XMS and just the right set of TSRs running, involving mucking about with menu driven config.sys/autoexec.bat tailored for their use cases. Consumer electronics and computers of the time demanded a steep learning curve, but they could still do magic, leading to the trope in the 80s and 90s media of tech wonder kids doing awesome stuff way better than the adults. Even if you have a super advanced submarine and very smart people, you needed your teenager computer kid to outclass everyone.
By now, we’ve made high res touch screens that can be embedded in everything for cheap, and embedded systems that would be the envy of a pretty high end desktop from the year 2000, which was capable of running more friendly operating environments. The rather open ended internet has largely baked in how the participants get to play. The most common devices lock down what the user can do, because the user can’t be trusted not to break themselves with malware.
The end result is that we may have the same proportion of people with the deep technical skills, but a lot of people are now unimpressed. In the mid 90s, less than 1 percent of the population had direct internet experience, and by 2008, 25% had that experience. So even if you still have 1% of really tech savvy people, there’s over 24x as many non savvy people that don’t need to marvel at those savvy people because they are getting about what they want out of it.
Yeah, fair point. My first computer was a Tandy TRS80, followed by a ZX81. You pretty much had to learn BASIC to get them to do anything at all.
That just means they are probably less relevant skills.
